What Are Deckbuilding Games? TCG vs Deckbuilder vs Roguelike
What card and deckbuilding games are, how TCGs, deckbuilders, and roguelike deckbuilders differ, plus key titles from Magic to Slay the Spire and Balatro.
Holding a few cards in your hand and pondering "what should I play this turn?" is a very old pastime. But over the past decade, one of the words you see most often in game stores is deckbuilding. That's because indie games where you fight or score with cards, such as Slay the Spire and Balatro, have scored one big hit after another.
The term "card game," however, covers games that are quite different from each other. The main types are collectible card games, where you buy and collect cards; deckbuilding games, where you grow your deck during play; and roguelike deckbuilders, which combine this with random dungeons. In this post, we focus on these differences while covering the genre's definition, subcategories, key titles through history, and design principles.
Definition and Core Appeal: Your Deck Is Your Strategy
A card game is a game where you draw cards from a set collection of cards (a deck) and compete using their effects. Among them, a deckbuilding game is a genre where building the deck itself is the heart of the game. English Wikipedia explains that in deckbuilding games, as in collectible card games, each player uses their own deck, but instead of buying cards in random packs, most of the deck is built during play.
The basic flow goes like this. Everyone starts with a few weak cards, draws and plays a few cards each turn, and uses the resources gained to buy better cards and add them to the deck. When the deck runs out, the discard pile is shuffled to form a new deck, so the newly bought cards gradually start showing up in your hand.
The appeal of this genre can be summed up in three points.
- The fun of combinations: A card may be ordinary on its own, but combined with other cards it becomes a powerful chain (combo).
- The fun of growth: A weak deck becomes noticeably stronger as the game goes on.
- The fun of handling probability: Since you don't know what will come into your hand and when, judgment that reduces luck and raises expected value becomes skill.
Subcategories
| Type | When the deck is built | Features | Key titles |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collectible card games (CCG/TCG) | Before the game, from collected cards | Card collecting and trading, opening packs | Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon Trading Card Game |
| Digital collectible card games | Before the game, with digital cards | Online matches, effects hard to do with physical cards | Hearthstone, Legends of Runeterra |
| Deckbuilding board games | During the game, bought from a shared market | Fair competition starting from the same conditions | Dominion, Ascension |
| Roguelike deckbuilders | During the game, from battle rewards | Random maps, start over when you die | Slay the Spire, Monster Train |
| Card-based hybrids | Actions from other genres as cards | Expressing RPG, action, or puzzle actions as a deck | Inscryption, Balatro |
The most confusing distinction is between CCGs and deckbuilders. In a CCG, you collect cards and build a deck outside the game before entering a match, while in a deckbuilder the deck is built inside the game. So deckbuilders have the advantage of everyone starting from the same line, while CCGs offer the long-term fun of collecting cards.
Key Titles Through History
| Year | Game | Developer | Features |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1993 | Magic: The Gathering | Wizards of the Coast (designed by Richard Garfield) | The game that launched the collectible card game genre |
| 1998 | Pokémon Trading Card Game (GB) | Hudson Soft, Creatures (published by Nintendo) | Early digital card game bringing the physical card game to Game Boy Color |
| 2008 | Dominion | Donald X. Vaccarino (published by Rio Grande Games) | Board game that set the standard for the deckbuilding genre |
| 2010 | Ascension | Stone Blade Entertainment | Deckbuilder with an ever-changing shared market; digital version also released |
| 2014 | Hearthstone | Blizzard Entertainment | Free digital card game played with 30-card decks |
| 2019 | Slay the Spire | Mega Crit | Popularized roguelike deckbuilders (Early Access 2017) |
| 2020 | Monster Train | Shiny Shoe | Roguelike deckbuilder about defending a multi-floor train |
| 2020 | Legends of Runeterra | Riot Games | Digital CCG where attack and defense alternate each turn |
| 2021 | Inscryption | Daniel Mullins Games | Combines deckbuilding with horror, puzzles, and meta narrative |
| 2024 | Balatro | LocalThunk (published by Playstack) | Roguelike deckbuilder scoring with poker hands |
A Genre That Started with Paper Cards
Magic: The Gathering, created by Richard Garfield in 1993, turned the collectible card game — collecting cards, building decks, and battling — into an industry. From the late 1990s, digital card games began bringing this experience to computers and consoles.
In 2008, the board game Dominion appeared. Instead of buying and collecting a deck in advance, you grew your deck by buying cards from a shared market during the game, and after winning Germany's "Game of the Year" (Spiel des Jahres) award in 2009, it popularized the genre name "deckbuilding."
The Era of Digital Matches
Blizzard's Hearthstone (2014) sped up matches by reducing the need to react during the opponent's turn, and made it possible to play across PC and mobile. It also made active use of effects impossible with physical cards, such as "generating random cards." Blizzard announced that it had passed 100 million players as of November 2018.
The Roguelike Deckbuilder Explosion
Slay the Spire, released in Early Access in 2017 and fully launched in January 2019, combined deckbuilding with roguelikes. As you climb a randomly generated tower, you pick cards one at a time as battle rewards and refine your deck by removing useless cards. Wikipedia credits this game with sparking the roguelike deckbuilder trend (2014's Dream Quest is cited as the first example of this approach). The sequel, Slay the Spire 2, launched in Early Access in March 2026.
Balatro (2024) added chain effects from Joker cards to the simple rule of scoring with poker hands, and as a solo-developed game it sold more than 5 million copies by January 2025.
Design Characteristics
Key elements in designing a deckbuilding game include the following.
- Deck thinning and dilution: Adding good cards makes your deck stronger, but more cards lower the odds of drawing the one you want. That's why the ability to "remove" weak cards is as important as the ability to add them.
- Resource curve: Resources such as mana or energy determine how many cards you can play in a turn. The balance of cheap and expensive cards creates the deck's rhythm.
- The rule of three choices: Roguelike deckbuilders usually have you pick one of a few cards as a reward. Offering fewer choices speeds up decisions and creates plans like "let's go this direction this time."
- Synergy axes: Prepare several interlocking axes, such as poison, block, and card draw, so that a different deck comes together each run.
- Information disclosure: Showing in advance what the enemy will do next turn (intent display) increases the weight of planning over luck.
Collectible card games add the challenge of card collecting and the business model. Random card packs have been compared to loot boxes and have become the subject of regulatory debate in several countries.
Recommended For
- People who enjoy calm, thoughtful play like board games or card games
- People who want to win through planning and calculation rather than reflexes
- People who want runs that last around 20 to 60 minutes and unfold differently every time
- People who want to choose between competing against others (CCG) or diving deep into a solo challenge (roguelike deckbuilder)
If you're new, starting with a roguelike deckbuilder is less daunting — Balatro, with its familiar rules, or Slay the Spire, where you naturally learn how a deck grows by picking reward cards one at a time.
Card and Deckbuilding Games Today
Today, deckbuilding is both an independent genre and a "component" attached to other genres. Games keep coming out that express strategy game actions, action game skills, or puzzle game blocks as cards. That's because the card format is a tool that cleanly presents randomness and choice.
On the competitive card game side, short matches are the trend. Marvel Snap, released in 2022, featured matches with 12-card decks that end in about three minutes. Physical card games also remain a big market, and Hasbro announced that Magic: The Gathering recorded $1 billion in revenue in fiscal year 2022.
The charm of card games lies in solving a new problem every time with the few cards in your hand. The fact that the same card takes on a completely different meaning when the deck changes is why deckbuilding continues to be loved.